European Journal of American Culture - Current Issue

This article locates a psychological mobilization of natural settings in the post-war Westerns Duel in the Sun, Lonely Are the Brave, and Man in the Wilderness, which I refer to as ‘Sisyphean’ landscape allegory. This narrative of inner conflict is not only expressed through an inhospitable terrain per se, but also through the protagonist’s physical attempts to navigate and/or overcome it as a primary obstacle. I argue that the existential sense of futility these films invoke through their Sisyphean sequences serves to corroborate audience angst rather than to assuage it. At the same time, the larger therapeutic agenda of these films for American audiences varied according to their cultural milieu.

The Western is widely seen as a cinematic means of embodying the American culture in which it was produced. The canonical dividing line between ‘classic’ and ‘revisionist’ Westerns coincides with the end of the Hays Code, when the Western genre, and American culture as a whole, underwent their most significant tonal shift. This article is primarily an analysis of a 1958 allegorical, classic and pacifist Western, The Big Country. This film promotes a revised attitude towards previously accepted moral conventions of violence within the genre and should thereby be understood as a revisionist work. Furthermore, The Big Country’s pacifistic revisionism creates a stark contrast with canonical revisionist Westerns and thereby calls into question the criteria for classifying films as ‘classic’ or ‘revisionist’. Ultimately, I argue that the drastic shift in tone and theme in New Hollywood Westerns has obscured the revisionism inherent to the genre and perpetuated a reductive view of the variations, shifts and nuances of the thematic arguments of Westerns from Classical Hollywood.

During the silent and early sound era, the Western became one of the most popular genres, making stars of actors like William S. Hart and Tom Mix. The genre ranged from epic Westerns such as The Covered Wagon (1923) and The Iron Horse (1924) through to quickly made B-movies, and even on to short parodies. The Western emerged from the silent era with a maturity not present in other genres, and its appeal only grew during the pre-code talkie era. At the same time, American film was exploring male sexuality and gender norms in a way that it would not be able to do again for several decades. This article traces the relationship between images of male queerness and intimacy within the Western during the first four decades of American filmmaking, from the early short films of 1894 through to the introduction of the Production Code in 1934.

James Mangold’s 2017 film, Logan, offers up a future world in which the X-Men are no more. All that remains are a few old and ravaged mutants, including Logan and Xavier whose worsening dementia is having a catastrophic impact on his psychic abilities that is becoming increasingly dangerous for others. Both of these former X-Men become roped into assisting a group of synthetic mutant children as they run from those who attempt to subdue and destroy them. Principal among these children is X-23, Laura, who has been created from Logan’s DNA. By staging this potential daughter along with a suggested queerness of the other mutant children the film seemingly offers up a critique of patriarchal ideologies often at the heart of the superhero genre. However, this article is concerned with the way the film intertextually references the 1953 Western film Shane, which creates an ambivalence in Logan’s meaning. The presence of Shane, the article argues, disturbs the surface gender critical storyline offering up instead the sense of a redemptive heroic masculinity that wrangles patriarchal ideology in through the backdoor.

The Western’s central theme of historical progression, the transition from the old to the new, is often symbolically paralleled in the relationship between ageing and youthful characters. This contribution offers a cursory overview of Westerns that illustrate the range of relationships between young and old at a time in American history which was characterized by generational clashes over the Vietnam War and wider (counter-)cultural movements. The focus will be on three films in particular. The Cowboys (1972) is in many ways the culmination of John Wayne Westerns in which the star takes over the role of a tough but benevolent grandfather figure teaching the youngest generation the ways of violence so as to defeat a wayward middle generation (standing in for a radical counter-culture), thus signifying a conservative ideal. In Bad Company (1972), the youth is abandoned by their parent generation, victimized by their elders, and the ways of violence forced upon them to ensure their survival, thus signifying liberal disillusionment. In The Shootist (1976), finally, disillusionment and nostalgia are fused in a complex portrayal of the ageing protagonist’s simultaneous doggedness and recognition of his own outmodedness and the youth’s simultaneous rejection and veneration of his mythic status.

This article explores the video game Western and its relationship with ideas of temporality surrounding the American West. The fledgling video game industry first put ‘Cowboys and Indians’ on arcade screens in the 1970s, creating a playable digital West for gamers. Content and aesthetics proved decidedly simple, with game worlds reliant on prior filmic presentations. By the 2000s, thanks largely to technological advances, video game Westerns began to offer quantifiable depth and complexity, with Rockstar Games’s Red Dead Redemption series (2004–18) being a leading example. Video game Westerns represent the next technological as well as cultural representation of the ‘Wild West’ in all its complexities. In this article, I explore how both old and new video game Westerns have toyed with notions of ‘time’ and how we experience ‘the frontier’ a century on from the lived historic period. I argue that games not only invite players to (re)visit a distinctive ‘frontier time’, but also, by their coding and mechanics, actively encourage players to subvert the temporal flow of Western history on-screen and even disrupt the West’s larger cultural meaning.

This article explores queer and non-heteronormative subtexts in connection with representations of rurality in the Disney family sitcom Hannah Montana (2006-2011). The multi-layered world, which the protagonist Hannah Montana/Miley Stewart inhabits, is shaped by sexual undercurrents closely linked to an imagined rural space. This space is constructed as the ‘sexual other’ in relation to the gender and body politics of the show’s main setting: Mailbu, California. In particular, the protagonist’s original home state of Tennessee forms a cultural repertoire in which dominant norms of gender performativity are ignored or subverted. Certain hints at queer codes and practices become identifiable when the rural space is invoked and contrasted with the perceived, sanitized ‘sexual normativity’ of Southern California. Projecting the non-normative onto the rural allows Disney to protect the show’s image as so-called wholesome family entertainment. The resulting play with queer practices, such as gender-bending and cross-dressing, is shown to connect with Disney’s attempts to queercode characters and spaces in order to facilitate the effective marketing of the show across multiple segments in an increasingly multi-sexual teen market. The role of the extratextual personae of Miley Cyrus and Billy Ray Cyrus complement this strategy, through their functioning as instructive models for ongoing negotiations of sexuality and gender among multi-generational audiences in the early twenty-first century.

In the late 1970s a new music movement, rooted in British punk and New Wave music, emerged in West Germany. It distinctly was not only sung in German, but the lyrics played with the German language by adding Dadaistic elements or youth slang, and reflected on the political, cultural and social zeitgeist of late Cold War West Germany. Over the years this formerly underground music genre was labelled ‘Neue Deutsche Welle’ (NDW) and became a commercial success, both domestically and abroad: Artists like Peter Schilling became known in the United States, the biggest hit ‘99 Luftballons’ by the band Nena reached number 2 in the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983 in its original German version. Like many other New Wave music, NDW songs found their way to mainstream success in the United States through the club scene, radio shows and the then new music television. At the same time, coming from the then still divided Germany catapulted the bands right in the middle of the Anti-war and Anti-nuclear movements at the end of the cold war, even when NDW bands themselves oftentimes labelled their music as non-political.

This article examines Kenneth Lonergan’s film Margaret (2011), which can be viewed, I suggest, as an essential post-9/11 text. As I argue, the events of 9/11 serve within the film as the backdrop against which broader (geo)political questions of grievability are negotiated, as we see through the sprawling and pseudo-allegorical melodrama of the narrative, following a young woman who accidentally causes the death of a pedestrian by distracting a bus driver. In the first section of this article, I read the film’s geopolitical engagements alongside Judith Butler’s writing on grievability as well as Akira Mizuta Lippit’s writing on allegory. I suggest that the film’s uneasy allegorical imbrications gesture to a nexus of ethical and political questions regarding allegory and its rhetorical uses. In the second section, I examine the ways in which the film’s form and aesthetics bespeak a Derridean engagement with mourning and spectrality, ultimately gesturing to the United States’ grappling with the atrocities of the War on Terror and the attendant ontological instabilities arising in the haunted urban spaces of a post-9/11 New York City.

Review of: Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, Marquis Bey (2022)

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 138 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47801-844-5, 138 p/bk, $24.95

Review of: Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, Joseph Plaster (2023)

Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 358 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47801-895-7, p/bk, $28.95